Don Quixote: “The First and Most Completest Novel” (LIT2182.01)

Marguerite Feitlowitz

We will immerse ourselves in the first European novel, Cervantes’ 1605 tale of the wandering knight, his faithful Sancho Panza, and the cast of hundreds they meet along their way through La Mancha. We will read Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote, as well as biographical sources (such as Cervantes in Algiers, on the author’s years of captivity by the Barbary Pirates), and contextual materials (such as Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World, on pre-1492 Christian-Muslim-Jewish Spain). We will also consider Cervantes’ influence over the centuries, on writers such as Sterne, Diderot, Borges, and Calvino.